Q+A March 17: Corin Dann interviews Dr James Renwick

One of the country’s leading
climate scientists, Dr James Renwick, has criticised the
government for a lack of leadership on adaptation around
climate change.

Dr Renwick told TVNZ’s Q+A
programme that farmers need prepare for a drier climate in
future, adding: “I think the government does have policy
around adaptation, but I think, yeah, there could be more
political leadership on this issue.”

He also said
that New Zealand needed to opt for more sustainability,
lower intensity and lower stocking rates in order to cope
with the change in weather patterns.

“The present
intensification of farming and dairying, in particular,
doesn’t look very sustainable, given the way the
climate’s likely to change.”

Dr Renwick told
the programme that global warming was the only explanation
for the drought, saying the average around which
temperatures vary is changing and will be hotter over
time.

“So what we call a very warm year now will
be a cold year in 50 or 60 years’ time. What we’d call a
dry summer now will be getting closer to the normal summer
in another 50 to 100 years’ time.”

Q+A,
9-10am Sundays on TV ONE and one hour later on TV ONE
plus 1. Repeated Sunday evening at 11:30pm.
Streamed live at www.tvnz.co.nz

CORIN
Listen, thanks for coming on the show. I know
you’re literally just back off the plane this morning.
Tell us what is happening to NZ’s climate. Paint us a
picture of what’s going
on.

JAMES
Well, like the rest of the globe, NZ’s climate is
warming up gradually. Temperatures have risen by the best
part of a degree in the last century, and they’re set to
rise by two or three degrees or maybe even more over the
course of the coming
century.

CORIN
And this isn’t some normal- What is this? Is this
climate change at
work?

JAMES
Yeah, it is. Yeah, climate change, global warming.
Put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and things warm
up.

CORIN
That’s interesting, though, because there is
sometimes a perception, and certainly Bill English in
Parliament this week was sort of saying, ‘Well, you know,
climate changes. It happens. Farmers have been used to it
for years.’

JAMES
Well, that’s true. The climate varies. It always
has and it always will. You know, things go up and down. We
have dry years, wet years, cold years. That’ll keep
happening, but the average around which things are varying -
that’s changing over time. So what we call a very warm
year now will be a cold year in 50 or 60 years’ time. What
we’d call a dry summer now will be getting closer to the
normal summer in another 50 to 100 years’
time.

CORIN
I guess the point that I think Bill English and
others are making here is should we be panicking just
because we’ve got another drought? We’ve had plenty of
droughts before.

JAMES
Well, no, I don’t think panicking is very
helpful.

CORIN
But it feels like that with this drought, though,
doesn’t it?

JAMES
It’s a pretty exceptional event, yeah. It’s
probably the first time in 50 years that it’s been this
dry over this much of the country. So, sure, it’s
exceptional. You know, a farmer would only see this once in
a working
lifetime.

CORIN
But if we’ve only seen it once in 50 years,
should we not be that worried? That suggests it’s not
going to happen for another 50
years.

JAMES
Well, the way the climate’s changing, the
likelihood is that summers will become drier, so what’s a
one-in-50 year event now will be, say, one in 20, one-in-25
year event by the middle of the century. And in some parts
of the country, it might be a one-in-five year event by the
end of the century, which means the farming sector’s going
to have to adapt to that. We’ve got time - it’s decades
we’re talking about, and farmers are very adaptable, but
things will have to
change.

CORIN
The point is, though, that NIWA, and I guess the
official advice that the best scientists in NZ can give to
our government is that climate change is changing our
climate, that farmers need to
adapt.

JAMES
That’s the bottom line, yeah, and NIWA had led a
lot of good research on this through the Ministry for
Primary Industries and so on. And there’s some very clear
messages out there through the ministry about how farmers
can adapt to the changing climate as we go through the
century.

CORIN
Do you think we are adapting? Are you seeing a
strategy? Do you see any urgency around that
adaption?

JAMES
Yeah, there is adaptation happening in some areas.
There are some farming groups that are more on to this than
others, so, you know, like all things, it happens in a
patchwork kind of
way.

CORIN
Can we afford to be patchwork,
though?

JAMES
Ultimately, no. No, we can’t. It is an incredibly
big issue. It’s the biggest
issue.

CORIN
So do we need almost like a government strategy
saying, ‘Right, we’ve got a problem here. We have to
start adapting
now’?

JAMES
I think the government does have policy around
adaptation, but I think, yeah, there could be more political
leadership on this
issue.

CORIN
It’s interesting, though, because, you know,
we’re a country which is making a lot of money from dairy
farming. We continue to want to try and push more cows into
more paddocks to make more money. If we end up in a
dry-farming climate, can we do
that?

JAMES
No, basically. But the way you respond to that is
to go the other way - go for more sustainability, lower
intensity, lower stocking rates, that kind of thing. So, no,
the present intensification of farming and dairying, in
particular, doesn’t look very sustainable, given the way
the climate’s likely to change.

CORIN What
about water, the issue of water, just in particular for
cities? Do you think that New Zealanders in general are
going to need to start thinking more about water, conserving
water? Perhaps we need to see more of a price signal on
water or something to make us use it
better.

JAMES
Oh, perhaps. That’s one way you could go, but
also storing water, storing more water and storing it more
efficiently, using it more efficiently. That counts for a
lot. Winter times are not likely to become drier, so I think
it’s going to come down to storing the water when it falls
or when it flows in the rivers and using
it.

CORIN So
the issue of sort of incentivising people to be a bit more
frugal with the water, that’s not such a biggie, in your
mind?

JAMES
Oh, that’s part of it, for sure. You know, being
efficient with resources is definitely the way of the future
- water, energy,
everything.

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